


Third Time's A Charm

by j_m_z_19



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Dubiously Consensual Blow Jobs, F/M, It's not as bad as the warnings sound, M/M, Please Don't Hate Me, Translation, dubious everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-10-26 10:08:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_m_z_19/pseuds/j_m_z_19
Summary: It's a loose translation of my own fic.If Jardani had gone to school at all, he might have realized that just like in all cliched stories, he had fallen head first for his absent father immediately upon the latter's arrival. The entire audience could hear the chorus sing, while our protagonist on stage remained oblivious with his eyes shut tight. Jardani begged, benighted, at the center of the stage and almost angrily: Look at me. Please, just one more time. It’s almost like if Winston paid slightly more attention, he would’ve been able to carve out a space for Jardani outside the spotlight. A perfect place above and within a seemingly endless darkness.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [诗不过三](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20606153) by [j_m_z_19](https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_m_z_19/pseuds/j_m_z_19). 

** _Darwin._ **

** _They say he read novels to relax,_ **

** _But only certain kinds:_ **

** _nothing that ended unhappily._ **

** _If anything like that turned up,_ **

** _enraged, he flung the book into the fire._ **

"This one's nineteen."

Jardani learned he was nineteen in 1983. There had never been a birthday party, or in fact anyone taking the time to explain to him which date and year his birthday was, or why he was named with his name. 

In year thirteen he first noticed the tangled dark hair growing, tickling against his thighs. Fondling the blade of a knife, Jardani stood in front of the only dust-covered mirror in the boys' bedroom, imagining shaving himself anew. His face stared back blankly through a spotty haze. 

The floor shook, vibrated as some other boy ran down the dark hall. Loud thud on the door. Knife fell, blade first through the crack between floorboards. Jardani twitched as the wood splintered. 

He slept with a girl for the first time when he was fifteen. A bit late compared to other boys in the theater. Jardani remembered the year as he could recall it being the coldest winter since he got to New York. Minsk was colder, but New York tasted duller, the stillness more brutal.  He remembered the boiler room, eyes hissing in almost darkness. The girl's face side-lit by flame. She grabbed onto his arm. "Look at me, Dani. Look at me." She whispered. Jardani didn't look. His ear touching hers, translucently red against the light. His head against the floor, next to hers, like two watermelons buried underground, under cement, waiting to be smashed in.

Jardani had never had a watermelon before he came to America. The first summer in Brooklyn (was he eight, or nine?), he saw for the first time a young boy, sitting on his mother's lap, holding half of a fruit bigger than his own head. Red pulp, dark green skin. The scene hovered over Jardani's nightmare for decades. It was as if he tripped on some Minsk street and dove head first into a canvas, blinded by its vibrance. It was too late. He was in Brighton Beach as his eyes opened. 

The boy's cheekbones shimmered in blinding summer heat, the white of his eyes a cold, sickly yellow. asphalt bubbled and burned around them. It must've been 100 degrees that day. The mother clutched on to the young boy's arm. Her face seemed a blur in the nightmare, overshadowed by her church hat. Was it a Sunday? The boy looked up at Jardani, chewing. Pink slushed down his chin, dripping generously onto his plump little stomach.

At some point, Jardani was on a ship to America.

He couldn't remember the exact year. There was a hollowed out room underneath the deck big enough for all the boys and girls. The walls blocked most of the sunlight. Jardani lied quietly on a thin blanket for most of the days. After a few days, the nausea went away. Their giant filthy cradle rocked endlessly, back and forth, left to right. People can get used to almost anything in a few days.

The boy to his left carved screeching lines on the walls. One, two, three, four, five. The lines counted in vain. The boy soon realized. Sometimes they only get to go on the deck every couple days to stretch their limbs. The food always came too late, and then even later. Time mattered less when there's nothing you could do with it. 

Jardani made a new friend in the darkness. He called the guy "brother", пшал. Everyone referred to each other as siblings, sorting out a mess of limbs, caressing. Breath weighed like blocks of steel. They all knew they came from different wombs, or coincidentally the same one. They'll most likely never find out. 

Ambiguity left no place for taboos. But Jardani was too young, not yet interested in tangled limbs. "You're not into it either, eh?" His friend lied next to him. The boy looked around fourteen in his memories. His eyes timid, melancholic. His hand combed through Jardani's body as he told him stories. Everywhere he touched seemed to have then fallen off of Jardani's body, like auto parts that rusted over and snapped in half. The cross-section sent signals of numbness through his spine, like lightning, then like nothing. As if they weren't parts of Jardani anymore, but belonged to his friend temporarily.

Jardani liked the stories. They were stories about their nameless ancestors. His friend could read, even in Romani. Back in Minsk, his friend voraciously collected old Romani books thrown out by Belarusian families during the ban, hid them under the theater floorboards. He told stories from those lost books, from his own fading recollection. He said their ancestors came from India. Jardani painted in his mind imaginary Indian merchants in their light colored suits, with blurry faces and moist lips, waiting to narrate. His friend said that they received their name Tsiganoi from the Greeks, meaning the "untouchable". He explained that they were considered diseased, with heritage in thievery, grown from roots of evil, when in fact they were Kshatriya warriors who used to be Dalits, climbing up in castes by dying, bathing in their own sweat and blood.

His friend's voice filled with pride. Though what Jardani imagined was a pit in the earth, so vast that it's like a hollowed out city under the sun. Bodies piled on top of each other at the bottom of it, moaning, sobbing solemnly, communicating with an animalistic language. Some of them tried to climb up, crying with dirt rolling off their tongues. Their blood-soaked nails clawed against the walls.

His friend said their ancestors were sent to the west to fight a war, and the history books showed that they had indeed reached the middle east, where they planned to be.

"Then what? Why didn't they go back to India?"Jardani asked. He couldn't imagine what kind of people would travel so far, for so long, only to become the "untouchable" disease, the homeless race of another continent. His friend didn't answer. Instead, a gasp rushed through the older boy's body. His face twitched next to Jardani, as if in pain. For a moment or two there was silence.

"пшал." Jardani repeated, "_Why didn't they go back to India?_" When raised, his voice still sounded like whispers in the crowded darkness. "Ummm..." His friend turned to him, eyes blank for a couple of seconds. He looked almost dead. "I'm not—I'm not entirely sure. The book ended there." He said slowly, as Jardani watched life gradually light up those irises. "Maybe they lost the map. Maybe they were ashamed."

Jardani's friend got up, half crouching under the low ceiling, buttoning up his pants. The giant cradle rocked underneath them. He tip-toed to keep balance. 

He looked back at Jardani, reaching out to tap the boy's shoulder awkwardly. After a moment of hesitation, he squeezed the fragile bones. Tiny bones. He thought to himself.

"Good night, Dani, Good night." He said. 

Jardani completed his first kill when he was fifteen. He kneeled in front of the man with an open neck. Pink gurgled out from between his lips, from the hole in the middle of his throat. His face was pale to the point of a luminous green. Every time his body arched up in protest, the pink stream foamed around the wound. Jardani stood up and stepped away to vomit.

He could taste the summer heat as he wiped his lips. —It tasted faintly sweet.

A man visited the theater the day Jardani learned that he was nineteen. It was the fall of 1983. The doormen nodded, instead of approaching to inspect this mysterious visitor as he walked into the lobby. He didn't even have to take off the leather gloves. The dome ceiling collected his footsteps. At first a cloud of shadow against the sunlight behind, limbs and features surfaced eventually. He looked thirty, or forty. Sharp eyes. 

The Director lined the shirtless boys against the wall, in the most extravagant room of the entire theater. Persian rugs hanged behind them, chandelier dangled above. They stood, staring at the opposite of the room, eyes landing slightly above the man's head. The older boys, who knew what this was all about, held their breath in anticipation, hoping their muscles to bulge a little more, their gaze a little more focused, intimidating to the right degree. 

The Director lifted Jardani's chin with one finger, then two. She held his face to force open his mouth slightly, showing the chattering teeth.

"This one's nineteen."

"Winston." The man took off his leather glove to shake his hand. Slicked back, his hair already faded to strands of grey under the spotty Chandelier light. He was a bit shorter than Jardani, drenched in the boy's shadow. But the boy stood still.  "What's the problem?" Winston asked. 

The boy hesitated, staring half through his body.

Winston seemed almost amused: "Or you could just tell me what's on your mind." 

"I'm calculating which year I was born in." Jardani answered. 

Winston's lips stretched out into a smile. His eyes perfectly still. 

—"Oh dear." 

Time had a scale from this moment forward. A new calibration. Jardani searched for exact events within his nightmares, trying to locate a place for a hungry body that had been passively falling through different canvases, into different scenes. A location to rest in. He could recall some of the particularly impressive stories, and counted the alternating summers and winters to make sure that they indeed happened.

Most of the time though, Jardani could not solidify the vague recollections of blizzards or heat waves. The fleeting sensations—a pain, a burn, a frozen numbness—glided over his skin in vain. He couldn't remember the age at which he lost his first baby tooth, the year when he stopped wetting the bed or ejaculated for the first time in his sleep. He scanned his memories for news announced on the radio, people's discussions around him, like a mariner searching for a broken anchor in dark, ominous waters. The years drained fast through the crevices between his fingers, melting into a borderless void. Jardani had no chance in forgetting any of it, since he had no chance in remembering them in the first place.

Winston taught him how to dress proper, eat proper, and how to kill proper, maintaining vigilance and swiftness alike. Jardani learned most of those things with ease, except for eating with elegance.

He could pretend well in front of others. However, when by himself, Jardani seemed compulsively hungry. He ate with his bare hands, stuffing food until his cheeks inflated, chewing with a loud, dampened sound. His lips opened unconsciously, with his tongue brushing against them, as if that's something to swallow too. Sauce dripped onto his collars, painted the corners of his mouth. He licked his fingers.

He ate like this when there was only Winston and him.

Winston was surprisingly tolerant. He never made a comment, even smiled occasionally, as if he was satisfied with the hunger Jardani seemed to had only let shown in front of him. The boy was curious where he was from. The British accent mixed with a New York endnote, sparkling at the tail of Winston's sentences. It always made him sound at ease, half intrigued, amused by the very sight in front of him. 

"What's so funny?" The boy once asked.

"You are like an animal." Winston replied. The boy sat up straight, half embarrassed, half angry.

"It's a compliment." Winston said. His own glass was empty, but he didn't bother getting up. The antique chair creaked under him. Creak. Creak. Creak. "Most people could not wait to assimilate themselves into this system. Power, money, a sense of belonging, etcetera. But you seem to desire something completely different. " He paused to look at Jardani. The boy was silent. "And you're famished for it. "

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's something more unattainable. It's greedier."

Jardani shut his mouth, but chewed louder in protest. Winston laughed quietly. He barely moved his body when laughing, but lowered his chin. His eyes perfectly still.

Jardani imagined those eyes, floating above him in a dark room—perhaps this room, looking at Jardani, observing his body, recording the moment as he ejaculated. Those eyes could get distracted by dim red numbers on the digital clock, next to his bed. It's two or three in the morning with a date and year. Winston wouldn't even need to touch him. Jardani's body, placed on the bed and staying so temporarily in a definite moment in time. The space fit comfortably around him, just right for his size. — Jardani had an erection he had to hide with the cloth napkin.

"I'm waiting for you to correct me." Winston asked, endnote shattered, sparkled. As always.

"No." Jardani mumbled while swallowing the last bite of his steak. His eyes fixed on the pale pink blood on the shallow plate, waiting for his erection to grow flaccid. There was nothing to correct.

Cre-e-e-e-e-eak.

Jardani wanted Winston, naturally, as if that was the way it was supposed to be. He didn't have many samples of principled, moral relationships to examine while growing up. The wanting was vague at first, like the ceiling turning upside down as he wrestled other boys at the theater: Those tightened thighs strangled him. Their strong arms pinning down his wrists. Jardani sometimes allowed this dazzling pressure to last, closing his eyes in pretended fatigue, chewing the pain of being overpowered shortly before flipping the opponent over and ending up on top. He imagined Winston overpowering him. Or better yet, Winston wouldn't need to exert any physical power, even though Jardani was always stronger. The boy wouldn’t struggle. Maybe he’d struggle a little, half heartedly, only to beg for more, for the suffocating pressure.

Jardani imagined the body underneath the suits.

He thought about it for so many years that even when Winston smoothly transitioned himself into middle age, and then into the body of an old man, Jardani could still trace the outline of a younger Winston from the man standing on the Continental rooftop. Cars honked and people yelled: “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOIN’ YUH DUMBASS MOTHERFUCKER...” But sixteen floors above, Winston stood in the rooftop garden. The body immersed in a cruel, vague painting of the downtown morning lights. It was absurd. Jardani knew so well of the filthy streets underneath, the bodies curled up in fetal position, unconscious on the sidewalk, the diseased, pigeon-eating rats. But the ethereal garden dangled in mid air, sixteen floors above, with such hypocrisy.

Jardani drowned in this vision, shivering in a cold river of tenderness.

Over the decades, he never thought of it as himself falling in love with Winston over and over again. Rather he was always in love with a figure painting with no defined contour. This figure stood through time with such stillness, occupying definite space with a persistence Jardani could only be envious of.

If Jardani had gone to school at all, he might have realized that just like in all cliched stories, he had fallen head first for his absent father immediately upon the latter's arrival. The entire audience could hear the chorus sing, while our protagonist on stage remained oblivious with his eyes shut tight. Jardani begged, benighted, at the center of the stage and almost angrily:  _Look at me. Please, just one more time. _ It’s almost like if Winston paid slightly more attention, he would’ve been able to carve out a space for Jardani outside the spotlight. A perfect place above and within a seemingly endless darkness. Jardani could lay in it, with vivid, photo-realistic memories of when he lost his first baby tooth, when he first ejaculated or stopped wetting his bed. The place would be neither too crammed or too open. He would know exactly where to rest his limbs.

The more intangible Winston's affection seemed, the more Jardani trembled for those scattered moments. Jardani waited, almost unconsciously, for those times when the man's gaze fell upon him. His dick would twitch, eager to respond, like a classically conditioned dog. A finger tip on his collar, the lingering warmth of a glass handed over. Winston lowered his head ever so slightly when smiling, but somehow with his gaze still fixed on the boy, carving out pieces of bright red flesh from within. That's how it was in Jardani's nightmares. —Winston always seemed at ease, half intrigued, amused by the very sight in front of him. 

"Do I intrigue you?" Jardani asked in his dream, voice so hoarse as if it came out of an old man who had lived an entire life, with no strength left to propose another question.

The silence warmed him.

Everything went wrong at the end of year nineteen. (Jardani thought the day he learned his age counted as his birthday, secretly of course.) It happened to be the day he finished his fifth job. The horizon brimmed with a faint, pale blue as he drove into the city, then back to the Continental. His room was all prepared, dark and warm behind the door. Jardani dragged his feet towards the bed as his young body slipped out of the blood drenched suit. A trail of jacket, shirt, pants, shoes, socks on the carpet.

Jardani stood in front of the mirror, evaluated, lazily combing through the hair starting from his belly button. The thin pathway got lost at some point, then reconnected. His eyes followed. The pubic hair fluffed up by his fingers, slowly untangling. He shot a hopeful smile at the reflection.

He smelled his fingers. It smelled damp, complex. Not bad enough to warrant a shower right now. Maybe. He studied it a little more.

"Or maybe you should just take a shower."

The voice sounded amused. Jardani turned, muscles tensing. Then he recognized Winston by the dimly lit doorway.

"I did knock." The voice said. Jardani's face burned in the darkness. Winston sat down on the couch, smiling at him, as if this was something natural. As soon as Jardani's eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Winston's expression seemed strange. Under close inspection, the face became a crowd of words that had been read over too many times, melting into odd shapes that barely resembled a smile.

"Sorry. Perhaps you need some privacy." Winston was like that sometimes. He maintained as the most well-mannered man all across the New York underworld (which is not a high standard if Jardani was being honest). Then occasionally, he would do strange things like this. _This_ meaning whatever the fuck he liked. But he seemed so at ease that it made everyone doubt their own perception, reevaluating that maybe this is the natural, well-mannered thing to do.

Winston turned on the lamp next to him. Contradictory. Jardani stood right outside the edge of the light, shivering, waiting for the enemy to announce the execution.  _Please. Please. Pretty please. _

"Considering that you have been here for a whole year as of today, I took the liberty of picking out a little anniversary gift for you." Winston waved his hand at a garment bag laid out on the couch. The zipper slightly down, showing a dark fabric.

"You need a decent tux." Winston stood up and stepped closer, not to the door but towards Jardani. He seemed amused at the overall situation, but left an arm's length between the boy and himself, as usual. Jardani's breath grew shallow, sipping in the distance between.

_Please. Please. _ Winston reached out, almost touching the side of the boy's face. The fingers landed on a strand of his dark hair. Dried blood flaked off as Winston examined, almost playing with it. He blinked: "Promise me, Jardani, shower before you try it on."

— "I don't want a tux." Jardani said.

He has only been this bold once in his life. Really not living up to the tattoo on his back. _But who knows what stupid thing I could do tomorrow_, Jardani thought in that brief moment. Maybe it was the lingering adrenaline, the young, blood-soaked body became a living thing by itself, shameless by its own accord. His feet slid forward, shrouding Winston in his shadow before he realized. Jardani could smell the complex cologne on Winston, tangling with his own damp, muffled scent. A faint fishiness of blood. 

Winston's face was too close that it became slightly unfocused.  The blurry face performed a look of surprise, with eyes perfectly still: "What would you like then, Jardani?"

Jardani found himself stumped. He wanted a singular, simple thing. However explaining it would be beyond his ability. It didn't help that he was never good with words. The thing was a contour-less shape in an out-of-focus image, to the point that he could only conjure up half of a coherent thought: _I wanted._ —The "want" appeared before the object, before a goal. This's how animals operate. His dick was hard again. Winston seemed to not have noticed. The thing erected and waited hopefully, desperately, anxiously against Jardani's will.

—The boy mumbled defeat: "...Nothing, actually —Nevermind, I just thought..."

It was a lie.

"Forget I said anything." He concluded. 

Winston didn't buy it. He repeated: "What would you like, Jardani?" The breath brushed against the boy's cheek. Winston's expression became strange again, like lost, unspoken characters that only appeared in hell. Jardani never knew how violent one's heartbeat could be.

_I want to rest. He said, leaning in as he speak. His erection pressed against the man's suited body. He made sure the precum left a dark wet spot on Winston's shirt. He tingled in poisonous revenge._

_I want you to look at me. One more time. I want you to touch me. He continued: I want you to fuck me. I want you to make sure of me. I want you to tell me what I look like, what shape I am in. I want you to tell me the shape of the inside of my body. I want you to tell me the time and year. I want you to speak my name, narrate it, leaving me a place deep in the night, within the monstrous, violent carcass of this city. I want to know that you'll remember me, just like you watched me being born into your hand, only a year ago. I want to know every moment. I want to know what time and year it is._

"Just...a new name, a pseudonym. I want one of those, like all the other initiated ones." Jardani only said, carefully chewing his words over: 

"I want a place of my own."

Winston looked at him, for a moment seemed to be contemplating the message behind Jardani's plain request. —Of course it's not about moving out of the Continental. Winston's expression contained a hint of calculation, though not without an amount of pity, a kind of cruelty that's easily mistaken for tenderness, a sliver of fascination. He stared at Jardani's bright erection under the moonlight, like he had just noticed. The boy shivered, waiting for the adjudication.

Winston closed his eyes, and then opened them. The boy remained.

It was a beautiful body, but heart-stoppingly horrific at the same time. A freakish fetus that only glowed a gentle light in the eyes of its mother. Under Winston's tracing fingers was a trembling little thing. Skin thickened and welted from layered scars on the shoulder blades. The spine, covered with undulating, hardened muscles. More scars. The waist, the ass, back to the waist. Dark, ugly scars climbed his body like reptiles. Every mark moaned quietly, hoping so desperately to be touched, wishing that he had never been born.

Winston's hand left.

Jardani's eyes were still closed. He heard Winston say: "The name Jardani means 'God's Gracious Gift'. Has anyone told you that before? The English name closest to it in meaning would be Jonathan. It's from Hebrew, originally meaning "God Has Given'. Though interestingly, god's name remained unspoken here, since it was considered as too sacred."

Winston backed away. The voice drew a distance between them:

"Good night, Jonathan."

** _But still, just the way it is,_ **

** _it can do what the rest are not yet able to do:_ **

Jonathan's eyes remained shut. Winston's touch burned behind his eyelids. Rise, fall, rise, fall, rise, fall, rise. The finger strung together a twisted shape of him in a moment of secrecy. A shuddering black line across a blank canvas, an accidental stain. —He stood here right at this moment, as if he was supposed to be here all along. As if he was taken care of, observed and remembered since birth, from the beginning. 

And right there, Jonathan hoped for this moment to last just a little longer. The room stretched like a piece of gum on his finger tip, pulling his flesh and bones separate, glueing together every second of the rest of his life.

** _unremembered_ **

** _not even dreamt of_ **

** _it accustoms me to death._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The bold texts in this chapter are excerpts from Wislawa Szymborska's poems, Consolation, and First Love.  
2\. All historical contexts in this fic (the Minsk backgrounds, the Soviet ban on Romani literature, the origin of Romani people) were all taken directly from articles on the internet. The origin of the Romani people as stated in this fic is only one of the more popular theories out there. Please inform me if I'm wrong on any of this stuff.  
3\. пшал means "brother" in the Romani language according to the internet. But I understand the language varies a lot depending on where the specific group of Romani people resided. Please inform me if you know of a better translation in Belarusian Ruska Roma language. Thank you!  
4\. Tsiganoi was, to my understanding (a.k.a the first two pages of google results) a commonly used but pejorative name to refer to Romani people in many countries. Again, according to the internet, the word originated from the Greek word ἀτσίγγανος, to which the more ancient form would be ἀθίγγανος, combining ἀ and θίγγανος, meaning "untouchable".


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "How does a person tread through the different, murky areas of life without anchors within their own body to remember things by? How does a person hope, or forget? It's almost like a book written by the blind. For over eight thousand days and nights you recorded crowded shapes that only meant something to yourself, to a man who could never trace them over for the second time. They were scattered lines, stories that jumped from one page to another."

"Do you still know Russian well, Jonathan?"

Winston once asked him. Jonathan was thirty-six at the time. Winston stood next to the window in his office, dressed in his silk night robe. Jonathan couldn't help but notice that the dark blue complimented his eyes. A day later he will deliver to Jonathan an official invitation from the Tarasovs and a briefcase heavy with a generous down payment. He knew they had been talking.

"Of course." Jonathan nodded. He was always better at Russian. His mother tongue —the collaged, beautifully complex language was never his strength. Back when he was on the streets of Minsk, he only knew enough Romani to communicate in secret with boys from the theater.

"Interesting." Winston opened the window as he replied. The sharp smell of morning grass wafted in as the curtains were blown up, hiding Winston's face behind for a short second . "I tried learning it when I was younger. I was quite terrible for a while."

It was hard for Jonathan to imagine Winston being terrible at anything at any point in time. The morning breeze had him tipsy. Maybe it was the silk robe, Winston looked a bit more familiar, like he had just allowed Jonathan to consider him a certain way. They rarely shared good days like this.

"When I first started learning, a friend told me the tenses in Russian were different from the ones in English. And according to him, because of that, no matter what you say —something as simple as 'I've bought a bouquet of flowers' or 'I've kissed a girl' —things in the past lacked a specific, lasting consequence. It is never indicated for how long the consequences will affect the subject, and when they will come to an end. Furthermore, if you say 'I buy flowers', you're not necessarily buying flowers now, in the past, the future, or repeatedly throughout the years. Time does not dictate action, the hand that reached out, the flowers that miraculously appeared in your grasp as you took the hand back. It becomes an eternal action." He smiled at the look of confusion on Jonathan's face.

"I was fascinated with this idea at the time, —though needless to say it's not very accurate. It somehow helped me in appreciating this famous Russian poem. The lost consequences, the eternal, fleeting action. It doesn't reside in you for five minutes, a year or twenty. Before this, I never understood in translation the weight of this famous line from the poem. It suddenly made sense. An action happening for an eternity, it's as if it never happened at all..."

Realizing that these lines were of no importance, Winston gestured lazily to the side, casually wiping the words away. Daylight brightened through his fingers. Somehow the words disappeared just like that.

The night when Jonathan bought his own house and moved out of the Continental, Winston gifted him a bottle of 50-year-old Karuizawa. It's a shame Jonathan never actually learned how to appreciate the finer things in life. "This is clearly a waste." Jonathan opened the bottle in front of Winston, politely forcing him to join. It didn't take much persuasion.

After the fifth glass, Winston asked: "Tell me about Minsk, Jonathan."

"Have you never been?" Jonathan looked at him suspiciously. Winston looked intrigued, on the verge of exhibiting a fondness that didn't belong on his face. But not yet. But that's how he always seemed, even in front of rows of bodies that had just started to decompose, waiting to be tossed in the incinerator.

"I'm interested in your version of it."

Jonathan was silent for a while. He started, first hesitantly: "Well, I can't really ——There were the summers. We'd be in Minsk for the summer, performing. We were one of those ——those traveling theater groups. There were a lot of us back then. Tough business. It was hot ——rained all the time during the summers. We would have to run back to camp when it rained. Sometimes it rained when it was still sunny out. The rain would reflect light, illuminating the entire city."

"—What did we do? There wasn't much. When we had no performances, we stole. People thought of it as what we were supposed to do. So why not? You can tell the distinguished people fairly easily. Though no one had much money back then, there were still nice things. And people were naive, trusting, shopkeepers leaving doors open as they unloaded goods. ——I was caught once. The guy beat me up, bent my arm backwards, trying to take me to the police station around the corner. However my friends then grabbed some candy from his shop right in front of him, taunting him. He had to let me go to run after them."

"We stole mostly food. Occasionally, if we were with the craftier, older boys, we'd get some rubles. We spent all of them on booze, candy and cigarettes. The older boys had started smoking already. I only wanted food. Somehow I was always hungry, no matter how much I got to eat."

"I remember the day Yuri Gagarin died. I was very young. Can't remember how old exactly. My older brothers and sisters sat around the radio, all sobbing. The adults were crying, too. From the atmosphere I thought someone close to us had died. However, when some girl from the theater actually fell from the stage and snapped her neck open, only a couple of her sisters shed some tears."

"They hid under the blanket as they cried, too, like it was embarrassing. But everyone could hear them."

"In the winter we'd move to nearby villages, taking care of their horses and lands for them, in exchange of lodging. There was so much snow. Since we often stayed in the sheds, the doors were thin. There were a few times the doors were blown down by the blizzard. Other times, the snow was knee-deep. We couldn't open the door and had to jump out the second floor window. We'd land on the snow. It was soft. It didn't hurt at all."

"There were lots to do in the winters. We'd get those homemade dynamite sticks and go to the river. They weren't powerful, but powerful enough for what we needed them for. The river as frozen, but there were still fish underneath. What you'd do is that you would place the dynamite sticks on the ice, and wait far away. With a loud bang, the ice would explode, shatter, leaving a hole in the middle of the frozen river. All the small fish were stunned to the point that they probably thought they were dead themselves. They'd float up to the surface, belly up, eyes wide open in shock......"

Jonathan's voice grew faint, then disappeared. His blushed in embarrassment. He noticed he had been talking for too long, but Winston only looked at him. The older man's smile was relaxed, fascinated. Hints of calculation almost unrecognizable.

"Do you remember when we first met, Jonathan?"

Jonathan nodded, cautiously.

"You told me that you were calculating which year you were born in." Winston lowered his chin slightly. The chair creaked under him as he sat up. "I was confused at first. Then I realized what you meant. You never had anyone telling you how old you were exactly, or when your birthday was. It wasn't a common situation, but also not as uncommon as you might think."

Winston's glass was empty. His fingers rested on the table. For a second Jonathan thought Winston was going to reach for his hand. But the fingers only rested there. If Winston wanted to, as long as he wanted to, he only needed to reach a bit farther—no more than three inches—to touch the man in front of him.

"There was amazement, too, following the surprise. How does a person tread through the different, murky areas of life without anchors within their own body to remember things by? How does a person hope, or forget? It's almost like a book written by the blind. For over eight thousand days and nights you recorded crowded shapes that only meant something to yourself, to a man who could never trace them over for the second time. They were scattered lines, stories that jumped from one page to another."

Winston smiled: "But just like that, it left you no room for secrets. Your story becomes an open book that no one can read, not even yourself."

_There's always room for secrets. _Jonathan thought stubbornly. A different kind perhaps, within scattered shapes. His stomach knotted in despair as he watched Winston's fingers on the table. Perfectly still. He breathed, chugging the words down.

** _For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,_ **

** _and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches_ **

** _turn without exception to the sea._ **

** _As if all you can do here is leave_ **

** _and plunge, never to return, into the depths._ **

** _Into unfathomable life._ **

Jonathan was fifty when he married Helen.

Helen was younger, more beautiful. They lived just the right distance from the city. When Helen would take care of the plants in her pajamas, uncombed hair frizzed above her head, reflecting different shades of gold under the sunlight. She rubbed her eyes. Jonathan watched, as if he had died once and then was reborn. The scars, the ribs and knees that emitted a dull pain were only mysterious birthmarks. He was born into something nice this time, in a beautiful glass house with nothing to hide. Even the shadows at nightfall were soft, fuzzy with a washed out glow.

"Jonathan." Helen turned to call him. She only called him by his full name when she pretended to be mad, expressing her discontent with his voyeurism. Her body carved against the field of overexposed light behind her. And even as Jonathan walked towards her, she somehow didn't disappear into a borderless void.

How odd. He looked back, only to realize that he couldn't find a trace of blood on the newly polished floor.

They didn't have a wedding, and therefore did not receive many gifts. The only gifts were from Helen's family and friends. They were unhappy with Jonathan's decision to not have a wedding, but no one expressed anything explicitly. (And no one sent out anyone to murder anyone, Jonathan thought to himself. A real civilized crowd.) The night after they went to city hall, Helen opened the presents. She was in her nightgown, sitting on the cold floor, with her legs spread open. Jonathan's mind wandered off to the touch of her thighs.

"It's from my aunt." Helen put down the package. It was only half unwrapped, but clearly an ugly set of passed-down candelabra. She seemed bored, leaning back to the foot of the bed, looking up at Jonathan: "We can sell them at the antique store and get some cash."

She scanned the modern, luxurious bedroom around them, added: "Guess we don't need it though."

Jonathan shrugged: "I had a little bit saved up."

"Who knew? Good ol' American capitalism rewards professions like yours." She shook her head, letting out an exaggerated sigh: "I should've guessed." That's one of the little things Jonathan loved her for. He told her about his job eight month into them dating. Knowing he was planning his way out, Helen didn't treat it as a sensitive subject at all. She spoke of his life before like narrating some factual news piece, as if the protagonist was simultaneously Jonathan and someone else.

"Hey, John." Helen picked up a heavy one. "I don't know whose this is."

"Did they leave a name?" Jonathan tensed up for a second, grabbing it from her. He couldn't think of anyone sending a wedding gift to him with good intentions. Everyone knew not to disturb the retired. Not to mention most of them wouldn't even know where to find him.

On the package wrote: _Congratulations, Jonathan._ The dark ink ended with a familiar stroke.

It was a set of porcelain plates and bowls. ——The most not-Winston wedding gift Jonathan could imagine. He thought it would be another bottle of whiskey, or some other form of luxury he wouldn't even know how to consume. But the plates and bowls were almost functional, though clearly way too expensive and handpainted.

"A friend?" Helen asked.

"An old friend." Jonathan said, repacking the porcelain dinnerware and setting them aside. His wife extended her body on the bedroom floor, stretching. Her nightgown pulled up just one inch. Jonathan turned to cover her body with his, exploring the neck, back, waist, ass. Rise, fall, rise, fall, rise. For the next twenty to thirty minutes his body fitted into hers almost perfectly, sheltering her from the ceiling light like he belonged right there. She leaned up and kissed him, as if he was supposed to be kissed and held since birth, since the very beginning.

A void danced on his lips.

Jonathan woke up at 4AM, three days after Helen had passed. He dreamt of Helen for the first time today. They were out having dinner somewhere in the city, and everything seemed just fine. The food was good but not too memorable. Warm, yellow lights bloomed around her. Her cheeks glowing. He examined that face with such intensity and still couldn't locate a trace of doom. A perfect date. They strolled around after dinner. It was oddly bright as day everywhere, with no one in sight. The streets belonged only to the two of them. _She's right here. _Jonathan thought, not knowing why he though that. Helen walked in front, touching the limestone walls along her side as a child would, making sure she was drawing an invisible straight line. She extended out the other arm to keep balance as her body swayed to nonexistent music. _She won't go away this time. _Jonathan told himself: _I can hold her, touch her, as long as I reach for her. —Only I can steal her from the world's grasp._ Though he never reached out for some reason.

"John." She turned around, walking backwards while keeping a straight line. Impressive.

"Jonathan." She called out again, sounding amused. He looked up, only to find her face deflating like an accidentally squashed barbie head under the street light. Jonathan couldn't move an inch. Then it was her body, a few crumbled plastic bags held together by strings. Her blonde hair fell out in strands. Her smile withered, then frozen on a distorted shell. "Jonathan. As in 'God Has Given.' Huh." She said to herself.

"God doesn't give though, Jonathan. He only loans." The smile buried under deflated folds of skin, melted into a puddle of dirty water on the sidewalk.

Lights of yellow red white green blue and purple filled the streets. It was as if people emerged from underground. They stepped over the empty space that used to be Helen, rushing to their next destination. Reflections shattered and splashed, droplets splattered over winter coats, car doors, carried toward a million directions by a nameless crowd. Jonathan stood in the middle of the street, not knowing which body to follow. He looked down to watch as his own fingers started to fall off by the nails. His body creaked. Every joint snapped like auto body part that rusted over. Fingers, elbows, shoulders, head, neck, collapsing spine like a set of dominoes.

Jonathan woke up in shock. The clock next to his head spelled 4AM. A curtain of rain loomed over the house. The rumbling drowned out any remaining silence from his nightmare. The lawn, the trees and the driveway blurred into contour-less shapes through the window, contrasting the photogenic landscape from his memories, showered in golden light. That can't be true though. Of course there were days of rain when he lived here with Helen. It only seemed less of a terror.

He stared blankly at the area next to the window, tracing out in his mind the shape of Helen's body leaning down to trim the plants. When was the last time she watered those? They seem to be doing fine. Then Jonathan remembered he knew surprisingly little about plants. When was this scene from his memory？It was two in the afternoon. Helen called him Jonathan, pretending to be mad about something. Her waist turned against the light, like some fragile decoration, but tangible, familiar, smelled of a living human body, taking up a space that hugged tightly around her. Jonathan remembered walking towards her, pausing to look back, realizing that the floor seemed so unnaturally clean without a trace of blood.

It was at some point when he feared and cared about everything.

—When was it?

He calculated his own sleep. Jonathan realized he had slept for 12 hours straight. He climbed in bed the afternoon before. However his body still felt heavy. His ached from every crevice between the bones. All old injuries surfaced to the skin. He curled his left thumb. The motion shot a subtle pain up his arm. When did he hurt himself? Jonathan salvaged blurry events from his memories, finally realizing that it was the thumb that broke during wrestling training when he was sixteen. It hadn't act up in decades. Time drained through his body before he could notice. The room caved in, crumbling, leaving him in dark, ominous waters.

Jonathan received a bookbinding order a month after Helen passed.

It was his hobby for a long time, and something he had taken on semi-professionally in the past five years, only at a small capacity. This order was odd though. He received a polite but mysterious email inquiring about commissioning a hand bound book of poetry selected by the client themselves. They only wanted one copy, claiming that it would be a gift of some sort, while paying a very much above-market price. Two days later, before Jonathan thought of a good reason to decline, a package was placed at his front door, containing printed pages of the entire book.

Jonathan debated himself in his own head.

Then he debated Helen in his own head. What would Helen say to him, if she was here and knew of this? After she passed, he would sometimes converse with a mental image of her. Like right now. This is perhaps because John lacked any consistent company in his life to talk to on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. He knew Helen would find what he was doing ridiculous, which made him feel weirdly comforted.

"I should stay here with you."

"Don't be dumb, John." Helen always looked healthy and lively in his dreams, running from this end of the night to the other. But somehow in his conscious mind, Helen lied permanently in the brightly lit hospital room, lips drawing out a pale, faint smile. No matter how hard he tried, Jonathan couldn't seem to conjure up a clear image of her before the illness. In the scene burned onto his memories, Helen waved her hand impatiently in her hospital bed, "You need to relax, John. You need something to distract yourself with. You can't just waste all of your days sitting around, trying to win a battle against my death with sheer will."

"They put the files at our doorsteps." Jonathan held his arms to contest, "That seems pretty suspicious if you ask me. "

"Or they could've been referred by one of your former clients." Helen proposed another theory. "It doesn't seem like a hundred pages of poetry could hurt you, other than with some paper cuts." She was always convincing, but for some reason seemed even wiser since she had been sick. Or maybe people tend to assume that with terminally ill people.

Jonathan admitted defeat: "If you insist." He had only learned how to solve conflicts with violence when growing up, and was therefore never good at arguments.

Something sharp stabbed into Jonathan's foot as he stepped into the kitchen. He examined for a second to realize it was a piece of porcelain. He could hear the pitter-patter of Daisy running over from the other room, rushing to his rescue. "Don't com here!" He yelled, and Daisy seemed to understand. She stopped halfway, chased her own tail around in excitement to pass the time.

"Did you break something?" Jonathan asked the puppy, almost expecting an answer. "I'll take you outside in a second."

A drop of blood oozed as he took out the tiny piece of porcelain stuck in his foot, it quickly dried into a dark spot around the wound. He checked around to find the shattered plate under the counter. Jonathan sighed as he picked up the shards piece by piece. When he laid them out on the counter, Jonathan realized they were from the set Winston gifted Helen and him before they married.

He examined the piece in his palm, turning it around. For the first time he noticed a tiny number painted on the back of it: 4.

He swept up what was left on the floor. "I know, I know." Jonathan calmed Daisy while trying to piece the shards together on the counter. He lined them up along the cracks. It took a bit. The plate was completely smashed. After some rearrangements, the bigger pieces fit together crookedly. Painted and baked onto the bottom of it was the year this antique set was crafted: 1964. Jonathan blinked. It's now 2019.

_Fifty-five years old._ He calculated.

"She's very pretty."

Winston stood in the rooftop garden sixteen floors above as he told Jonathan. Pale flowers withered around him. Some fat pigeons lined along the edge of the roof in a precarious formation. It was the spring before Jonathan retired. He told three people in total about the good news. Winston was among them. Jonathan chewed his words slowly.

"Of course," He said, "but I don't recall showing you a picture."

Winston smiled. His smile didn't change throughout the years, ambiguous, elusive, filled with an artificial affection. "Maybe I was curious." He never lied, but could never be called honest either. Every word from his mouth sounded like an almost incestuous flirt from a father who simply invented his own set of morals. Tongue pushed against the gums. Endnotes sparkling a fragrance soaked in the best cognac. Winston's the only one capable of this. Anyone else would sound frivolous and slightly creepy if they talked like this.

"The thing you asked me for years ago." Winston suddenly said, as he sat down by the chess board, "You wanted a place of your own."

Jonathan's face burned. A nineteen-year-old's face, witnessing flowers bloom and wither, seasons alternate. He bit the inside of his lips.

"You wanted a place of your own. And I might have been overthinking it, but if you don't mind me saying, I've realized I also might have been right in my assumption years ago. The thing you desired was more unattainable, Jonathan." Winston set down his coffee. "Of course I didn't think you actually wanted a pseudonym."

"But you did give me a name." Jonathan replied stiffly. He didn't want to continue this conversation anymore, but Winston interrupted.

“I’ll admit I don’t have a sufficient excuse for turning down the other request.” Winston rarely insisted in exhausting a conversation, a thought. The chess pieces stood still in front of him. The rooftop brightened as clouds rolled over their heads. Sunlight was flat, filtered through and tainted by industrial smog, polishing the older man's face into an ominous expression.

"But I'd also have to point out that whatever you asked for—a place of your own, a piece of the world that fit your body—was quite greedy. It is practically asking for some form of proof from the world, to validate the legitimacy of your existence, to grant you the right. Most of us dared not to ask those questions. We feared that once we asked it out loud we would realize that we were in the wrong place from the beginning. Or worse, we feared that there won't be a solemn voice rumbling above in response. The worst scenario would a crowded silence." He continued.

"To ask for a place in the world, if I wasn't mistaken, is the same as asking to be loved."

—"Congratulations, Jonathan." Winston said at last. For decades after, this was the smile Jonathan remembered whenever he thought of it all : Divided by the stark shadow under bright daylight, the curve stretched from one end to the other, gliding over lines that marked years of unspoken things. Things that weren't important in the first place. The smile seemed surprising genuine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Again, all historical contexts were taken from articles from the internet. Same with weather patterns in Minsk and other details.  
2\. The bold text in this chapter is an excerpt from Wislawa Szymborska's poem Utopia.  
3\. The Russian poem mentioned refers to a different poem.  
4\. I owe everything about Russian grammar in this fic to 瑞雪，脏辫珍 and her friend. It all started from some probably totally false information from another friend.


	3. Chapter 3

** _You were saved because you were the first._ **

** _You were saved because you were the last._ **

** _Alone. With others._ **

** _On the right. The left._ **

** _Because it was raining. Because of the shade._ **

** _Because the day was sunny._ **

"The real question is, who do you wish to die as? The Baba Yaga? The last thing many men ever see. Or as a man, who loved and was loved by his wife. " Winston was tainted with a hint of bizarre, sickly green from infinitely reflected images of himself. If John cared to look, he might have been able to find some seemingly nonexistent weakness through the man's impenetrable armour of calmness. His hand, open and offering in front of John, weighed a delicate revolver with jade grip. "Who do you wish to die as, Jonathan?"

Blood burned at his throat. John wanted to sneer at the speech, the scene, the gun. He wanted to say he didn't give a shit about these anymore. When did that happen? Numbness crept in as he bled, stumbled, chopped his own finger clean and watched the ring roll off it like none of these, including the finger, the body, ever belonged to him in the first place. All of it a symbolic game, meaning nothing without a narration. Winston's narration in this case. But to John's surprise, he realized that immediately as he thought of laughing at its absurdity, other important things ebbed, drained from his grasp. John found himself barely standing with labored breathing. All he wanted was a pillow, a bed, a street corner to rest his body at. —Winston knew too well of how this goes. Winston knew too fucking well of everything.

In a thousand mirrors John's image rolled its throat, swallowed. A famished mute.

** _......_ **

** _So you're here? Still dizzy from_ **

** _another dodge, close shave, reprieve?_ **

** _One hole in the net and you slipped through?_ **

** _I couldn't be more shocked or_ **

** _speechless._ **

** _Listen,_ **

** _how your heart pounds inside me._ **

John stood in front of Winston, covered in blood, exhausted. Old and new scars crisscrossed his body like complex landscape.

Nerves twitched as he bit down on the root of his back teeth, reminding him that he barely had the strength to seek revenge. He didn't need Winston's revolver this time. The Glock 19 aimed almost intuitively. Somehow John wasn't anxious at all. It’d almost be an insult to Winston's gracefulness to consider the possibility of him having a couple bodyguards in his bedroom. But maybe that's exactly what he wanted John to think.

Sometimes John suspected the good form was only kept for convenience.

"You came later than I expected." cars passed outside the windows, down below. Winston's face surfaced in a fleeting light that tore open John's eyes. At first a cloud of shadow against the sudden brightness behind, limbs and features appeared eventually. Just like at Tarkovsky Theater. Only Winston looked like an old man now, with skin that hung loosely from bones, bones that have taken their fair share of blows and then fused back together with invisible scars.

"I didn't realize." John said. Winston sat down by the couch. John's gun followed.

"Even after the parlay?" Winston laughed silently. John took it as ridicule. His face twitched, back straightened. 

"Don't be dramatic, Jonathan." Winston looked up from behind his glasses. Unlike how people liked to imagine, those pale blue irises melted into a dense black in the darkness. Only the white of his eyes glistened. "It was a compliment."

"You didn't want to kill me then." John stood opposite from him, hands sweating.

"Now do you actually believe that?" Winston asked wisely, "You always wanted to believe in good, decent things. But that doesn't mean you actually believe them." Now that his features sharpened with details in Jardani's eyes, he seemed at ease, reluctant in defending his own life.

"You wanted me to live. You wanted him to save me." John insisted, "You asked him to."

Winston didn't contest.

"You wanted me to live, only to utilize my vengeance." John's chest heaved in something more complex than anger, more fragile than hatred. It clawed at his eyes from inside the sockets. He didn't expect to have a conversation with Winston. In his imagination of it all, Winston would be sleeping, dreams rolling behind his eyelids. As much as John liked to overestimate himself and push his own luck, he knew he couldn't do it perfect. He knew he would observe Winston's face in the dark, comparing the calm expression to that of a dead body. With enough references, he's gotten quite good at it over the years. He would imagine Winston's body six feet under, peeling slowly from a paleness that glowed luminously green into a rotting pile of dark red flesh, until John couldn't trace the outline of Winston from it anymore. John would wait, for a long time, for the strange taste of sweetness in his mouth to disappear, until he could line up the face with that of a dead body. Then he would kill Winston. Clean, quick, like he had done a thousand times. John didn't know how long it would take. But before the sun rises, eventually the moment would come.

—When he saw Winston next to the window, smiling, eyes perfectly still as he glanced over, John realized he fucked up. That was how it's always been. Fortune was undoubtedly on his side for certain things in life. And he excelled at them. 

However for other things his shit luck just wouldn't turn.

"You let me live, only so I could help you take down the High Table." John said, knowing fully how perfectly justified this sounded considering the world they lived in, but he never knew when to stop, when to shut up, when to halt before the cliff. "You let me live so I could kill for you."

"After all, that is your expertise, isn't it?" Winston blinked. He could be a total asshole if he wanted to.

John's face burned in rage.

"Jonathan." Winston sighed, getting up to stand face to face with John. "Like I said before, your problem is that you always wanted to believe in good, decent things, but that doesn't mean you actually believe them." He scanned over John's every wound, every strand of dark hair soaked in blood.

John's lashes trembled from the cold. "Santino said something like that before."

"Don't compare me to him." Winston scoffed. "As old and tired as I've become, I haven't gotten over myself enough to beg you for my life."

"But you'll convince me." John said. His eyes flickered, opened, readjusted themselves to the darkness. Winston sat down on the bed, poured himself a generous amount of whiskey. Then another glass. He offered, but John shook his head.

"I'll try, of course. Believe it or not, most people aren't eager to die. But I would never consider vengeance the only thing you have. I would never consider that your addiction, your drug of choice per se." Winston sipped the whiskey. He always knew everything.  _ I never realized how odd that is. _ John thought, it was as if Winston lived inside his body, wearing him comfortably. "That'd be a very harsh way to put things. I truly agree that you had no choice, just not in the way you think. It wasn't because of the fact that he burned your house down, or that Iosef stole your car, killed your puppy, or even how your finger was cut off. It wasn't because of what I did to you—all this—either." Winston gestured with his glass slowly, almost like a toast, as if that described perfectly what he had done to John.

"You shot me and had me fall off a building." John pointed out.

"Of course." Winston nodded, "I'm not saying the things we did were fair in any way. I'm only talking about you. What you did. Were you ever enraged by Helen's illness? By her death? Were you never able to understand why the world would strip you of your only anchor in life? But more dangerous than that was the fact that you couldn't understand why you were blessed with her in the first place, why you earned the top prize at a raffle you weren't allowed to enter. Jonathan, could you even fathom a reality where she didn’t only love the retired bookbinder?” His voice sounded almost gentle, “Could you ever imagine that she didn’t consider any part of you undeserving of love?”

John stood silently.

"As little as I knew her, I truly doubt that she'd be at all surprised if she was here watching you make all these foolish decisions. I doubt that she would stop loving you for them. However strangely, I suspect that you knew this all along. Though this knowledge couldn't seem to change your perspective on things." Winston continued, "We don't seem to let go of things we think we're undeserving of. They're like expensive shoes that are way too restricting. As kids, we never grew accustomed to them, never wore them in. Now we're trying to shave our heels, chop off our toes to squeeze into them. That's when we made the first mistake. We're confused, hateful, hissing in pain as we're tightly hugged by the exquisite thing. You see, it's a real predicament. We were greedy for it for so long. We were so afraid that we would never get a second chance once this one was taken from us. We were so afraid that we were willing to shave our heels, chop off our toes. However now we're totally, royally fucked. —These shoes still don't fit. They will never fit. They'll always be taken away. But now we don't have the option of walking the earth barefoot anymore. After all, Jonathan, how could you walk barefoot when you've got shaved heels and missing toes?"

John released the safety on his Glock.

"But I can end it all right here, right now." He walked closer, aim at Winston's head. "One bullet, and I can end all of this, and never think about it again. I only wanted to sleep, eat, be by myself. You—you and every one of them—wouldn't let me." His voice a half growl.

"You can go home right now, Jonathan." Winston chuckled, "I promise I'll have no problem with that. You can sleep, eat, do all that. But when you wake up, you will always feel the same pain, the same anxiety, the same hunger that persists, ravenous teeth grinding for flesh. Do you remember hunger, Jonathan? When you were in the streets, or on the ship to New York. I'm guessing you've experienced hunger, haven't you? When it got bad, when it got really, really bad, wouldn't you have smashed some innocent person's skull open, at the promise of a decent meal?"

"That's survival." John argued. He was biting down on his back teeth again. Pain made the dizziness a little more tolerable.

"Do you still remember hunger like that, Jonathan? If someone took your bread, could you tear open their throat with two bare hands?" Winston asked, more cruel, more merciless than John had ever remembered, "You will never get the bread back, and will have to suffer this tragic hunger for all eternity. But does it satisfy you in that moment, Jonathan, to watch the hollowed out darkness of what used to be his breathing pipe, to see his stomach acid dissolve what could've saved your life? Does it satisfy you? Why does it seem like it's only you, among all people? Why are you the only one who has to endure this eternal, unbearable hunger?"

John stood at an arm's length from him, finger on the trigger.

Gazing perfectly still into the bore of the Glock, Winston asked: "Why is it that there's no place for you—and only you—in this world?"

Blood seeped through the fabric, then soon started gushing out from the dark patches.

It wasn't long until his entire leg was soaked. Winston barely winced. The gunshot was almost silent, but he had heard the subtle, shrill cry way too many times in the past that it sounded like a bang in his ears. Winston glanced at his own bleeding thigh, smearing some of the dark blood around it as if to confirm a reality.

Then to his surprise, John crouched down and kneeled next to him, tearing off a sleeve from his own shirt.

Winston watched, half intrigued.

Vengeance seeped from every pore of the younger man's body, evaporating into the sealed room. Winston could almost smell the invisible haze of acrid smoke, the burnt ashes. John's touch was however gentle.

He didn't get up after bandaging Winston. John picked up the gun with one hand. His other hand rested on Winston's thigh.

He looked up at Winston's face, trying to outline a past figure that had ceased to exist. Cold sweat dripped from the hairline, drawing a trail through the forehead. The expression barely changed except for a subtle tick under his eye. John could ignore that though. It's almost like thirty-six years ago. He thought.

Thirty-six years. John unbuckled and unzipped Winston's trousers. He could feel the body tighten from pain under his hands. After pulling down his underwear a bit further, John could see Winston's penis resting on his left thigh. His bush of grey pubic hair curled around it. John imagined how they would have looked when he was younger.  _ Thirty-six years. _ The scale was cruel, heartless, chiseling away nothing in the world except from the minds and bodies of men. John leaned forward and took the flaccid penis into his mouth.

Winston remained silent. Nothing more than a slight twitch.

John is hard again. He swallowed with only his mouth at Winston's dick, clumsily reaching his neck forward, sucking his cheeks in. Saliva sloshed around, making a sound that reminded him of men dying with foaming blood in their throats. John's own penis seemed a strange organ to himself again, almost as if it didn't belong to him anymore. The thing erected and waited hopefully, desperately, anxiously against John's will.

He held his Glock in one hand, and unzipped his own pants with the other to start jerking off. The watery sound in his mouth almost like a muffled cry. It didn't sound like John's voice. Rather it sounded like it was squeezed out of some small creature lodged deep in his throat. Closer to a growl, or a newborn’s wail from hunger.

_ Please. Please. Please. _ He begged the voice to stop.

John engulfed the finally erect penis deep into the back of his throat, holding it there. Three seconds, five seconds, thirty-six years. His teeth and gag reflex were stopping him from going further, but John's brain refused to process the signals. He pushed forward, submerging it until the tip of his nose buried in the tangled, curly hair. His stubble brushed against the older man's thigh as he turned his head slightly to give a little swirl. He traced, held to remember the shape in his mouth, inhaled the smell. It never fit perfectly. It was uncomfortable, awkward, almost pathetic. Spit glistened on his jaw.

—His tonsils vibrated in laughter.

Winston came silently. John had already shot his load everywhere a minute before. He seemed to have intentionally ignored the common courtesy and sprayed his own cum all over his stomach, pants and Winston's (probably very expensive) shoes. He waited, picking up his pace, and then swallowed Winston's cum without missing a drop. The older man grabbed him by the hair and pushed lightly, shuddering, but John refused to retreat. He kneeled, holding the pulsating penis in his mouth until he squeezed out every single drop. John swallowed in dizziness. The back of his throat raw and sore.

Saliva dripped a thin, silver line as he finally pulled his head away.

Winston watched, seemingly still half intrigued, but not enough to ask a question. Winston's expression contained a hint of calculation, though not without an amount of pity, a kind of cruelty that's easily mistaken for tenderness, a sliver of fascination. John looked up at him, body limp from the melatonin produced by his orgasm. The fatigue had finally hit him. All he wanted now was to rest awhile, and then maybe a while longer. Maybe Winston will be here too, with his gaze perfectly still, letting his own blood slowly run dry. —John shivered at the thought.

"Why?" He asked. His head weighed like a block of steel, drooped against the knee next to him. The knee dampened with blood. Winston laughed a little.

"I thought they were all your ideas." He gestured above John's head, at the mess below his waist. Cum and blood and whatnot.

"No." John protested. "Not this." It took him some great effort to straighten up his slumped body, and look at Winston in the eyes.

"The things you said, Winston. You said them because you knew I wouldn't kill you." John looked down at his Glock, caressing it in contemplation. The night sky had already washed out into a dim grey outside of Winston's penthouse window. The day crept in, looming over sullied sheets and carpets. The stains dried on John's pants, which were still unzipped. Pubic hair tangled, stiff from crusted cum. Winston's eyes traced over the barrel of the gun and then back to John's face.

"Maybe I knew. Or maybe I didn't." John suddenly remembered. —Winston never lied, but could never be called honest either.

John raised the gun by an inch, pressed the warm muzzle against Winston's chest.

"Jonathan." The older man smiled. And with this smile unspoken things sparked and erupted in a bright, lasting lightning. Things he had planned to show, along with things that were never supposed to be told. The face, pale with fatigue and from the loss of blood, looked no more than thirty, or forty years old. Or maybe it was an even younger face, a boy who grew up under the bells of Saint Mary-le-Bow, shrouded by too many deaths too early in his life. His smile remained the same throughout the years, like an ancient relief that was only eroded of its outline in time. —It remained flawless even as it glowed with cruelty, with malevolence, sealed tight even as it slipped words of love, as if there was never despair to be found.

Winston opened his mouth, and words rolled out from under the smile, tumbling off his tongue："If I had ever spoken an honest line in my life, it would have been what I said to you, Jonathan. I'd rather die at the hand of a friend than that of an enemy. That has always been the truth."

—"Just don't make the mistake of pretending this is personal."

On his way out, John had the random realization that Winston had no mirror in his room. Not even one. He came out the door, followed the dimly lit hallway into further darkness. The abstract decadence of gold patterned wallpaper compressed around him. There was no mirror in the hallway either.

John thought of the poem Winston mentioned years ago, the one he was mistakenly fascinated by. the Continental door opened for John as he remembered the last line of the poem. Bright light gushed in front of his eyes. An avalanche of details painted the streets. A million store windows measured out a boundless space of light, of downtown Manhattan in reflections. The stores were not yet in business.  A million doppelgangers crowded the street scenes piled on top of darkness inside.

John was in none of these reflections. He walked past the dark windows, turned the corner, looked both sides before he crossed the busy morning street. The bitterness of Winston's cum lingered at the back of his throat.

—The end of the poem spoke:  _ Tell me, dear ones, if you please. Just what millennium is this? _

** _Scanning in his mind so many times and places,_ **

** _he’d had enough of dying species,_ **

** _the triumphs of the strong over the weak,_ **

** _the endless struggles to survive,_ **

** _all doomed sooner or later._ **

** _He’d earned the right to happy endings,_ **

** _at least in fiction_ **

** _with its diminutions._ **

Five years later, John learned that Winston had died.

Aurelio was the one to deliver the news. "Stomach cancer." He said as he poked at the salad in the take-out plate, wincing. That's always how Aurelio dealt with things. He might try quitting smoking for a week next time if he heard of anyone dying from lung cancer. "It's a pretty good way to go if you ask me. Considering the death-by-unnatural-causes rate among the help, it does seem like being the manager comes with its own benefits."

"You could say that, I guess." John poured coffee for Aurelio in the kitchen. As he turned around with the mug a sharp pain shot up his leg. It was a flashing sensation, but familiar. He checked the bottom of his foot, nothing. John set the mug on the counter, brushing over the skin. Still nothing stuck out. He crouched down to sweep the floor with his fingertips, left to right, far and near. It was in vain. There was nothing on the floor.

John didn't attend Winston's funeral. He hasn’t had any contact with people from his old world for many years. This kind of occasions always attracted a variety of people, all with different intentions in showing up. John hadn't touched a gun for too long and would rather not become the central target of the event.

It was a day out of any cliched movie. Torrential rain drowned the driveway. Strings of raindrops washed down to form a bright, dancing sheet on the windows. In the study, John was asleep with his head resting on crossed arms on the dark oak desk. His eyes rolled around rapidly in dreams, as if tracing a complex landscape behind the eyelids. If the camera panned down, we would be able to see a book, a collection of poems, laid open on his lap. It was a leather bound book he worked on a few years back, a gift requested by an anonymous client. His mysterious client never called or emailed after the initial payment. Maybe they had thought of a better gift, or maybe they had parted ways with the supposed recipient of the present.

John left the book in an envelope, then at some point moved it to on top of the bookshelf.

Today when he looked for a book to read, the envelope, sticking out a corner from the bookshelf, somehow caught his eye. It's always a shame to have a book just gathering dust somewhere in the house. John pulled the envelope and started reading.

It wasn't long, since the selection was curated by the client, according to their initial email. John examined his own craft in binding as he read. However not too long into it, as if under a spell cast by the roaring storm, John found it hard to keep his eyes open. It always went like this with the rain. He was a little cold, but not cold enough to get up, to get something warm. The book laid open, half read, on his lap as he fell asleep.

If we could look into the room from outside, all we would be able to see would have been the warm haze of light melting into a curtain of shimmering rain. The text in the book were impossible to make out. John hasn't gotten to the end of the book either. He was therefore still oblivious, much like us. The poem on the last page was about how the poet had heard that Darwin only ever read novels to relax. He would only read books of a certain kind, of good, happy endings. If he ever accidentally stumbled upon an unhappy ending, enraged, Darwin flung the book into the fire.

** _Hence the indispensable_ **

** _silver lining,_ **

** _the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,_ **

** _the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,_ **

** _fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,_ **

** _stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,_ **

** _good names restored, greed daunted,_ **

** _old maids married off to worthy parsons,_ **

** _troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,_ **

** _forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,_ **

** _seducers scurrying to the altar,_ **

** _orphans sheltered, widows comforted,_ **

** _pride humbled, wounds healed over,_ **

** _prodigal sons summoned home,_ **

** _cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,_ **

** _hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,_ **

** _general merriment and celebration,_ **

** _and the dog Fido,_ **

** _gone astray in the first chapter,_ **

** _turns up barking gladly_ **

** _in the last._ **

In the blank section of the page after the poem, before the footnotes, there was a short letter, handwritten and photocopied onto the page. John hasn't arrive at this page yet. He never read as he bound books either. Writings on pages became strange, meaningless shapes scattered across when he worked, as if they had been examined for too many times that the translated thoughts eventually melted into accidental stains. Crooked, mutilated black lines. He scanned over them, calmed by the void of meaning, the lightness they bore.

The short note went like this:

_ "Please meet me in Minsk, Jonathan, if it's not too late. I have rented an apartment there since a few years ago. It's nothing fancy, but thus nothing conspicuous. You can stay there for as long as you want. I would gladly join you, too, if company is what you desire. —The things that you asked of me years ago, if you still remember, are things I will never be able to give. However I am right here, everywhere, waiting. I will always wait for the last line, before you flip the page over, before sunrise, before an invisible hand tosses it into the fire." _

The dark ink ended with a familiar stroke.

John woke up around midnight. The rain had stopped outside. He closed the book to put it back in the envelope. Maybe someday he will finish it. But not today. He put it back on top of the bookshelf.

John made himself a sandwich, finished half of it before he took the dog out. As he reached the end of the driveway, John thought he heard someone calling his name. "Jonathan." He looked back. There was no one in the driveway. Of course. And it seemed like it was right at that moment, all of a sudden, rain started pouring down again. At first a few scattered drops, then within seconds, bright, flashing lightnings shone as roaring noise followed, drowning out John's mumbling: "Shit." He pulled on the leash, running back with the dog. Rain poured greedily, glistening, as if rushing to extinguish a temporal flame.

John could feel his shirt soaking wet on his back, but somehow warm with touch. The warmth lasted the width of a palm. "Jonathan." He remembered from an indistinct point in time, or foreboded from a sense of doom. It was as if someone was flipping through his life, walking a straight line, backwards, page by page and far to near. They rushed to be here before sunrise, before the flame charred his pages crisp and black. They rushed through an illegible story to stand in his shadow, and hold his nineteen-year-old back.

The palm traced down every jagged scar, as if to prove that even words burnt to ashes had existed at some point, in some place.

Good night, Jonathan. They said.

That night, John lied in bed after a hot shower. He had gradually gotten used to days without Helen. Occasionally he would even roll over to the other side of the bed. As darkness seeped behind his eyelids, John somehow thought of what Sofia said to him a long time ago. Sofia once said: "You're gonna die, John. Whether out here on this desert. Or somewhere else down the road. But you are gonna die."

Consequences. She said.

—It made John feel oddly reassured. He remembered the stories about his nameless ancestors as dreams flickered in the dark, drawing him in. Landscape unfolded, stretched as history vanished at some point in time. Narration interrupted. No one knew what his ancestors had encountered, or exactly why they had left their home, only to become the foreigner of every continent, the banished wanderers of every land. No one knew for how many centuries the unnarrated history took place in vain, erased as soon as it happened. No one knew for how long they trekked, hoped and despaired along the arduous journey. In John’s childhood imagination, his ancestors (looking like Indian merchants he had seen in Minsk, smelling of cologne and spices. Or was that his imagination, too?) trudged at the end of the desert. The sun hung at barely six inches above their heads. Sand smeared their features blurry, rough, but couldn’t protect them from the distorting waves of heat. They were emaciated, exhausted, thirsting for any kind of poisonous liquid.

Was that when they decided? When all directions became nameless, and all roads led to a uniform void. Did the people with remaining strength to reason realize that the moist reflection wavering in front of them was nothing but a mirage? Had they known this decision would seal the doom of their people for centuries to come, would they make the same decision still? Would they realize that they had no choice all along? A young Jardani imagined their hopeful, withering faces, faces that were sallow and swollen, faces in anguish. —They looked like faces of men who could finally lie down and die, after having loved for entire lives. They looked like faces of men who have never loved at all.

**End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Again, all historical contexts were taken from articles from the internet.  
2\. The bold texts in this chapter are excerpts from Wislawa Szymborska's poems, Consolation and Could Have, and Boris Pasternak's About These Lines.


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